Cycle time, leakage and combined ratio are measured everywhere in an insurer. The path a claim actually took — how many hands, how many times it went back, and how long it sat between them — is written down in fragments across claims, policy, document and payment systems, and reassembled by nobody.
1Why
Insurers hold more structured data per case than almost any other industry. What they do not hold is a single record of the case moving — because no system owns the whole of it, and the gaps between systems belong to no one.
Intake records the notification. The claims platform records the assessment. Document management records what arrived and when. Payments record the settlement. Each is accurate. None describes the journey.
A claim sitting between the adjuster and the medical reviewer is not in anyone's queue report. It is between two of them. That time is real, it is often the majority of the cycle, and it is invisible in every dashboard the business already has.
Reassessment, additional information requests, reopened files and reissued payments all register as activity in the system that recorded them. Only end to end does the pattern become visible as the same claim being handled two or three times.
Elapsed time on one claim
Cycle time is reported as one number. It is almost always made of two very different things, and only one of them responds to hiring more adjusters.
Illustrative shape of a common finding, not client data. The split between working time and waiting time is measured from your own records.
2Where
Claims is the obvious place to start and usually the most valuable. It is not the only process where execution and design have drifted apart.
Where cycle time, leakage and customer experience are decided.
Where cost, compliance standing and growth are decided.
3How
No new instrumentation, no data warehouse programme and no curation layer to build first. Four steps, from access to a live view.
Status histories, workflow logs and audit trails in the systems you already run. If a record carries a case identifier, an activity and a timestamp, it is enough.
Records from separate systems are linked back into one case — a single claim followed across everything that touched it, in the order it happened.
The process as it was intended, set against every path it really ran. Variants, rework loops, waiting time and team differences are counted rather than estimated.
The view refreshes as the data does, so drift shows up as it happens instead of surfacing in the next review cycle.
4What
Not a score or a maturity rating. The actual behaviour of your claims process, in units your claims leadership and actuarial teams already argue about.
How much of the cycle was someone doing something, and how much was the claim sitting between two teams or two systems.
Files that went round twice — reassessed, reopened, corrected or reissued — separated from files that went round once.
Where the claim crossed a boundary between adjuster, reviewer, vendor and payments, and what each crossing cost in elapsed days.
How many distinct paths one claim type actually runs, and which of those paths carry the delay and the cost.
The steps where discretion, manual override or missing information consistently moves the settled amount away from the assessed one.
Which open claims are drifting towards a service or regulatory deadline while there is still time to intervene.
Pick the line of business where cycle time costs you the most. We will tell you, before any commitment, whether the data you already hold can reconstruct it — and what you would see if it can.
